Friends
Ok, Goldman Sachs calls for the dawn of a new era in stocks and we go down for the third day in a row. Thanks for ringing the bell Goldman (you know I love to pick on the “evil empire”). For the second day, traders were concerned over slowing global growth, as overnight we got weak PMI (purchasing manager index) numbers out of both China and Europe. This led to selling of anything economically sensitive for the third day in a row. Once again, the more defensive, U.S. centric names held up the best.
For the day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 78 points to close at 13,046. The S&P 500 was down 10 points to finish the day at 1392 (we are in jeopardy of not getting our 1400 close for the week- we’ll need a good day tomorrow to pull it off). Gold was down $8 to close near $1642 per ounce (the gold rush seems to be over for now) and oil was down about $1.84 to trade near $105.43 per barrel WTI.
The only good news was a continuously improving weekly unemployment claims number. We seem to comfortably be hovering around the 350,000 number now, as opposed to the 400,000 level that we had so much trouble getting under last year. We’ll see how the week ends tomorrow, but it looks like we are having the first lousy week for stocks that we have had all year (we’ve had a few bad days, but not much more).
Have a nice evening everyone.
